ftp.cdrom.com/pub/cdrom//cdrom.tar/cdrom/reviews/chestnut

Text File | 1993-09-15 | 6KB | 127 lines

Article 14139 (22 more) in alt.cd-rom:
From: [e-mail] (Don - Hirschfeld)
Subject: Are Chestnut CDROMs This Terrible??
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 93 05:50:02 PDT
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
References:  <[e-mail]>
Lines: 20

I just purchased two CDROM from Chestnut CR-ROM, Inc. One was Our Solar
System (mostly good resolution photos from NASA) and World Traveler Vol I.
The Solar one has only one image under each subtitle, but creates a subdir
for just that single image. The viewer program provided through the poor
menu system crashes, saying not enough memory (I have 550k lower and 7 meg
upper free). So, I have to use my own viewer which means going into and
out of two subdir levels just to view a picture. It would have been better
to just have all picture of the same general subject like Jupiter in just
one subdir not in 30.
The worst CDROM was World Traveler. It said on the front "Breathtaking
collections of photographs taken by .....". The only breathtaken thing
I found is how incredibly bad the image quality is. It looks like they
were taken with the cheapest 110 camera which was dropped a few times!!
The photos are VERY blurry. A lot looked like bad snapshots. I would be
embarrassed if I were one of the two photographers to have such poor
quality work displayed to the paying general public!
If anyone has had experience with other CDROM's from this company, let us know
so we can save own money.

Don
=============================================================================
Article 14142 (22 more) in alt.cd-rom:
From: [e-mail] (David S Fenichel)
Subject: Re: Are Chestnut CDROMs This Terrible??
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: CD-ROM <[e-mail]>
Reply-To: David S Fenichel <[e-mail]>
Organization: FUNET-NGW
References: <[e-mail]>
Distribution: alt
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 1993 14:19:37 GMT
Lines: 39

On Sun, 12 Sep 1993, Don - Hirschfeld wrote:

> I just purchased two CDROM from Chestnut CR-ROM, Inc. One was Our Solar
> System (mostly good resolution photos from NASA) and World Traveler Vol I.

> The worst CDROM was World Traveler. It said on the front "Breathtaking
> collections of photographs taken by .....". The only breathtaken thing
> I found is how incredibly bad the image quality is.

> If anyone has had experience with other CDROM's from this company, let
> us know so we can save own money.

Well, Don, I have quite a bit of experience with the company, having done
some work for them (him, actually...)

I disagree that the World Traveler is the worst of them.  The rest are all
shareware, and no attempt was made to edit, clean or enhance the images
(in the case of graphics material).  The worst one, I think, is the
"Clipart Goliath" collection.  It purports to contain a wide variety of
both images and file-formats.  They were all PCX, and a bad format-
conversion utility was used to transform all the same files to TIF.  In
most cases it worked not at all.

Essentially the company's priority is to maintain a price-war among the
low-end discs, so that they may continue to generate titles with virtually
no overhead, from material gleaned almost exclusively from the local BBS;
and to deliberately perpetuate a poor quality of product in that market so
that they may most easily meet consumers' artificially lowered expectations.

Their principal business initially was in porno discs, such as those which
caused all of that furor recently in Oklahoma City (where a bulletin board
was shut down for both putting them online, and for selling them, contrary
to that city's "local standards of decency").  Chestnut is still producing
those discs, but the company name does not appear on the package, and they
are replicated offshore (in Denmark!).  Thus did originate the name:
"Chest Nut".

For shareware you would do better, in my humble opinion, to either
download your own, or to go with a more reputable source than Chestnut.
=============================================================================
Article 14176 (19 more) in alt.cd-rom:
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Are Chestnut CDROMs This Terrible??
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail]
Organization: The World Bank, Washington, DC, USA
References: <[e-mail]>  <[e-mail]>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1993 19:27:34 GMT
Lines: 37

Their TechnoTools is the worst programming CD-ROM I have ever seen. A complete
waste of time. Why isn't the PC press reviewing these things and giving advice?
They seem to be big sellers at flea markets.

=============================================================================
Article 14225 (19 more) in alt.cd-rom:
From: [e-mail] (Duane W Moore)
Subject: Re: Are Chestnut CDROMs This Terrible??
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 13 Sep 93 22:52:09 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail]
Reply-To: [e-mail]
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton,  OR.
Lines: 16

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Don - Hirschfeld) writes:
>I just purchased two CDROM from Chestnut CR-ROM, Inc. One was Our Solar
> ...
>If anyone has had experience with other CDROM's from this company,
>let us know so we can save own money.

I bought "Dictionaries and Languages" by Chestnut.  It was extremely
poor quality.

-- Duane

Duane Moore     T & M Service Engineering      78-649
Tektronix, Inc.    PO Box 500    Beaverton, OR  97077
[phone]              [e-mail]
=============================================================================